SYNTAX LIN 1310. Syntax is the component of grammar that deals with sentence structure. Before we...

SYNTAX

LIN 1310

• Syntax is the component of grammar that deals with sentence structure.

• Before we can talk about syntax, we need to discuss the nature of linguistic competence and the nature of grammar

The nature of grammar

• Linguistic competence:

Theoretically permits infinite production of novel utterances, including sentences.

How can our brains handle a system capable of infinite production?

Answer: The elements of the system are not infinite. They are finite in number.

Grammar

• A system that permits infinite creativity with a relatively limited number of elements, including speech sounds and the rules for combining them into words and sentences.

• The rules for making sentences are called the syntax of the language.

• What are these rules like and how are they stored as part of competence?

The Rules of Syntax

Does knowing the rules of syntax involve storing the syntactic structures of all possible sentences in our heads as a set of templates with slots to fill?

No, it does not.

Here are for reasons why not:

Reason 1

1. Rules of syntax allow sentences to be infinitely long. (The only limits are imposed by performance.)

Reason 2

2. All possible sentences have not yet been uttered.

Reason 3

3. Our storage capacity is finite.

Reason 4

4. Sentence interpretation is structure dependent.

That is, it relies on more than a simple linear (one word after another) organization.

(This will be explained further.)

The Nature of Syntax

The following slides present a number of illustrations of the nature of syntax and facts about language that a linguistic theory of syntax must account for.

Facts syntactic theory must account for: Fact 1

1. How words in a sentence are assigned specific roles with respect to one another.

• For example, in English active sentences:The first noun is the subject or doer of the action or agent. The second noun is the object or receiver (or theme or patient) of the action.


• Thus different interpretations for:

The dog chased the cat.subject verb object The cat chased the dog. subject verb object


• Word order varies across languages.

• In German, it’s subject, object, verb:

Das Kind wird die Schwester lehren.

The child will the sister teach.

subject object verb


• For some languages, like Welsh, the preferred order is verb, subject, object.

• For example:

darllenais i y llyfr

read I the book

verb subject object


• Other languages may rely more on some form of morphological marking than on word ordering to assign roles to words in sentences.

• However, these languages still have a most common or canonical word order.

• The other permissible word orders tend to slightly alter the focus of the sentence.

• See Japanese example on the next slide.


• Canonical word order in Japanese:• ‘Yumiko scolded the child’:• Yumiko-ga sono kodomo-o sikat-ta• yumiko-NOM that child-ACC scold-past

subject object verb

• Alternative order (focus on object):• Sono kodomo-o Yumiko-ga sikat-ta • that child-ACC yumiko-NOM scold-past• object subject verb


• The most typical word order in a language is called its canonical word order.

• 95% of the world’s languages have one of the following canonical word orders:

• SVO – Canadians like hockey. (English)

• SOV – Canadians hockey like. (German)

• VSO – Like Canadians hockey. (Welsh)

• VOS OVS OSV – rare or nonexistent


2. Sentences with different surface structures and word orders can have the same interpretation of who’s doing what to whom, even in a language with strict word order and no specific marking of subjects and objects.

Examine the following sentence pairs from English:


scrambled order:

The boy gave the toy to the girl. direct indirect

object objectThe boy gave the girl the toy.

indirect direct object object


active:

The student solved the problem.

(agent/subject) (theme/object)

passive:

The problem was solved by the student.

(theme/object) (agent/subject)


declarative:

Everyone is happy.

(verb)

yes/no question:

Is everyone happy?

(verb)


declarative:

You have been there.

auxiliary

yes/no question:

Have you been there?

auxiliary


3.Sentences contain discontinuous elements which are understood as part of the same structural constituent, as in:

perfect (auxiliary ‘have’ + suffix ‘-en’):

I have eaten.

progressive (auxiliary ‘be’ + suffix ‘-ing’):

I am eating.


Wh question:What are they looking at?Object

Declarative:They are looking at the dog.

object

NB: Although ‘what’ has moved to the front of the question sentence, it plays the same syntactic role as ‘the dog’ does in the declarative. Both are part of the predicate.


4. It is possible for sentences to be embedded inside other sentences.

The property of grammar which permits such embedding is called recursiveness.


Recursiveness also allows sentence constituents (parts) to occur inside other constituents. See the string of adjectives for the subject noun ‘dog’ in the following example:

The big gray shaggy friendly dog brought me the newspaper.’


In the following examples, note how a sentence can grow as more strings of adjectives, prepositional phrases and embedded sentences are added:

The dog was sleeping.subject

The big dog was sleeping.

subject ‘dog’ + one adjective


The big ugly guard dog at the factory was sleeping.

Subject ‘dog’ + string of adjectives + prepositional phrase


The big ugly guard dog at the factory which produces pillows that some people are allergic to was sleeping on the road that leads to the quarry where they found the hobo who had been strangled with a shoelace that was later shown to have been stolen from the woman on Main Street whose house was broken into last week.

subject ‘dog’ + string of adjectives + prepositional phrases + embedded sentences


5. Sentences with the same apparent structural elements and word orders can have different meanings or interpretations.

1) John is easy to please2) John is eager to please Subject verb adjective infinitive

On the surface, the structures of sentences 1 and 2 appear to be the same.


1) John is easy to please

2) John is eager to please

In sentence 1, John is unspoken/understood object of ‘to please’ subject = ? (somebody

In sentence 2, John is unspoken/understood,)

subject of ‘to please’ object = ? (somebody)


6. A single sentence may have more than one meaning or interpretation. This is called ambiguity.

Structural ambiguity:The two meanings hinge on different underlying relationships between the words in the sentence.

Example:

Visiting professors can be interesting.


The structural ambiguity of the sentence rests on the ambiguous structure of the phrase visiting professors.

[Visiting professors] can be interesting.modifier nounMeaning: Professors who have come here

temporarily from other universities. or

[Visiting professors] can be interesting. gerund noun

Meaning: For someone to visit professors.


Lexical ambiguity:

Alternative interpretations of a sentence rest on different meanings of homophonous lexical items.

Example:

She ate her cottage cheese with relish.

‘relish’ = condiment or enthusiasm.

The two words sound identical, but have different meanings.


7. Not all elements of a sentence appear on the surface, yet listeners can correctly interpret the sentence.

For example:

Joe likes pizza and Jack does too.

‘missing’ element: ‘likes pizza’

Both like pizza, but ‘likes pizza’ appears only once.


• Pronouns sometimes stand in for ‘missing’ elements:

Mary bought some ice cream and __ ate it.

Mary bought some ice cream and she ate it.’ If ‘Mary’ and ‘she’ stand for the same individual, they are co-referenced.It is also possible that ‘she’ is co-referenced with someone else.


8.There are quite strict rules for forming sentences which speakers must adhere to. Syntactically ill-formed sentences are ungrammatical.*Eats the food the child.

*Mary refused to allow that the children go to the

concert.✓Mary refused to allow that type of language.


9.Syntactic and semantic well-formedness are independent of one another.

The following sentences aresyntactically well-formed but semantically anomalous or nonsensical:

*Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

*A verb crumpled the milk.

Transformational/Generative Approach

• To account for these and other facts, most linguists adopt a transformational generative (TG) approach to describing the syntactic component of grammar.

• A TG approach emphasizes the search for Universal Grammar (UG).


• UG presupposes that languages operate under a shared set of categories, operations and principles.

• Although languages obviously differ from one another, their are common principles governing the way they form sentences.

• These properties of UG are called language universals.


• By using the same descriptive approach for all languages, linguists hope to identify language universals and gain a more complete understanding of UG.

• At the syntactic level, there are clearly two subcomponents found in all languages:

1. a lexicon

2. a computational system


• The lexicon or mental dictionary lists the words (and morphemes) in a language.

• The lexicon also includes information about each entry regarding:-pronunciation-meaning-form (root, affix, bound, free, etc.)-syntactic category information? (noun, verb, etc.)


• The computational system includes the operations that allow words to be combined into syntactic structures.

• The computational system has two major components:

Merge

Move


• Merge allows the creation of phrases (parts of sentences) and the combining of the these phrases into sentences.

• Move allows certain elements to be transported to a new position within a sentence.

• An example of a moved element is the word ‘what’ moving out of object position into sentence initial position in: ‘What are they looking at?’


We will examine the elements of syntax as follows:

1. The lexicon and the notion of syntactic categories

2. The creation of phrases (phrase structure)

3. The merge operation to form sentences

4. Types of phrasal & clausal complements

5. Move


• Transformational Generative theory has undergone many reformulations over the past 50 years.

• We are operating with a recent version.

• Thus you may encounter terms elsewhere that are roughly equivalent to the elements of syntax that we are examining.

• We will discuss these terms at a later date.

The Lexicon/Syntactic Categories

• There is some controversy in current linguistic theory regarding whether the syntactic category (noun, verb, etc.) of a word is stored or syntactically determined. There are essentially two positions.

1. This information is stored in the lexicon.2. The syntactic category is only determined when

the word enters into a syntactic structure.• We will not resolve the issue in this class. We

will assume position 1, although the reasoning behind position 2 may be discussed.


• All languages group their words into syntactic categories.

• We find remarkably similar syntactic categories across languages

• Your textbook provides example of the commonly found categories in Table 5.1.1 on page 133.


• The Lexical/Nonlexical distinction is roughly equivalent to the distinction we used in morphology:

OpenClass/Content or Lexical Words

versus

ClosedClass/Function Words

or Non-lexical• The chart is reproduced in the next slide

(Closed Class)

Non-lexical/functional

Non-lexical/functionalLexical


The classification of words into syntactic categories can rely on:

• the type of meaning they express• what inflectional affixes they take • the types of structures they fit into

(distribution)Classification relies on a combination of these approaches.

Classifying Syntactic Categories

We will apply these 3 types of classification in the following slides.

This will hopefully allow you to gain a better understanding of Syntactic Categories (aka: parts of speech)

Classifying Syntactic CategoriesMeaning

• The meanings of Lexical (Open Class/Content) words are generally much easier to define that those of Non-lexical (Closed Class/Function) words.

• Consider the words:

‘the’ (Non-lexical/Closed Class - determiner) and

‘brush’ (Lexcial/Open Class - noun)

‘the’ versus ‘brush’

• It’s easier to explain the function of ‘the’, or where it occurs (before nouns), than what it actually means.

• It’s easier to describe the concept ‘brush’ than the concept ‘the’.

Meanings of the Major Lexical Categories

Nouns: name entities –objects (book) –people (Mary)

Verbs: designate –actions (eat) –sensations (feel)

–states (be, seem)Adjectives: designate properties and attributes of

what nouns name (heavy book)Adverbs: Denote properties and attributes of

what verbs designate (eat quickly) Adverbs tell us ‘how, why, where,

when’.


• Meaning is not always a clear-cut way of deciding the part of speech of word.

• Some lexical/content words are more difficult to define.

• For example, the concepts ‘truth’ or ‘honesty’ do not name entities.


• Items from two different categories can have similar meanings.

For example, the verb ‘hate’ and the noun ‘revulsion’ have very similar meanings:

I hate carrots.

I feel revulsion toward carrots.


• Some words, like ‘brush’, can be a noun or a verb.

I bought a new brush (noun) for the dog.

I brush (verb) the dog every day.

Inflections for Determining Major Lexical Categories

• So we still need to go beyond simple meaning to define a lexical (content) word’s syntactic category.

• We can also look at what inflections a form takes, as inflections usually attach to a particular part of speech.

• Note the references to parts of speech in the following list of English inflections.

The inflectional affixes of English


Thus we can tell if ‘ship’ is a noun or a verb by seeing whether it takes affixes that normally attach to a verb or a noun.

‘ship’ + pl. ‘s’ as in:

I like to sail on ships.

‘ship’ + poss. ‘s’ as in:

The ship’s hull is painted red.

So far, it looks as if ‘ship’ is a noun.


• To be certain, lets see if adjectival inflections can be attached to ‘ship’.

• Comparative ‘er’ as in:

*That one is shipper than the first one.

• Superlative ‘est’ as in:

*That is shippest one of all.

So ‘ship’ is not an adjective.


• What about verbal inflections?

• Past tense ‘ed’ as in:

They shipped the package last week.

• Progressive ‘ing’ as in:

They are shipping the package by air.

So, it looks as if ‘ship’ is a verb as well as a noun.


• In fact, many words can belong to more than one lexical category.

• For example:brush (noun, verb)comb (noun, verb)near (preposition, verb, adjective)

• They got bored near the end.• They neared the finish line.• The are nearer to the end than us.

Distribution for Determining Major Lexical Categories

We have seen that neither the meaning nor the affix test tells us reliably which lexical category a word belongs to.

Another more reliable way of determining lexical category is by looking at a word’s distribution.


By distribution, we mean the type of elements that a word can co-occur with.

The most useful type of elements for distributional analysis are what functional categories a word can be used with, although we can also look at what lexical categories it can be used with.


For example:nouns occur with determiners such as ‘the’

‘the dog’verbs occur with auxiliaries such as ‘will’‘will go’adjectives occur with degree words such as ‘very’‘very hot’


• Verbs do not occur with determiners:

*the go• Nouns do not occur with auxiliaries such

as ‘will’*will lamp

• Neither nouns nor verbs occur with degree words such as ‘very’

*very lamp’ *very go

Homework

• Study Guide: Page 104• O&A: Page 170-171, Ex. 2

Think about how you could have used distribution, meaning and inflection tests in order to identify the syntactic categories (parts of speech) of the underlined words and words in the sentences of Ex. 2. Refer to Tables 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 in O&A for help.


• Distributional analysis helps us to see the difference between verbs and auxiliaries.

• A verb can co-occur with an auxiliary, but a verb cannot co-occur with another verb.We may eat.We have eaten. We are eating.

*We play eat.


• Sentences normally have only one verb.

• So a sentence with more than one verb is really more than one sentence.

• Such as two conjoined sentences as in

‘They’re moving and grooving.’

From: ‘They’re moving. They’re grooving.’


Or, two verbs might be a clue that there is a main sentence containing an embedded or subordinate sentence or infinitival complement as in

‘We are going to play.’

‘go’ is the main verb and ‘play’ is the verb in the infinitival complement ‘to play’.


• Further distributional analysis can show us that there are actually three types of auxiliary in English:

• Modals (will, would, shall, should, can, could, must, may, might)

• Perfect (have –en)

• Progressive (be-ing)


• Lets look at modals first.

• Modals can co-occur with verbs:

He will eat. He may eat.

• Modals cannot co-occur with modals:

*He may will eat.


• You cannot replace a verb with a modal as in

*’We are maying.’

• Nor can you replace a modal with a verb as in

*’We wish be eating.’


• Modals can co-occur with perfect ‘have’.

He may have eaten.

• Modals can co-occur with progressive ‘be’.

He may be eating.

Notice that when modals co-occur with any of these elements, the modal always comes first.


• Lets try a substitution test to determine whether the following are modals or verbs:

• Try substituting each of the following words for ‘will’ in the following sentence:

can, play, could, shall, see

• He will eat.

• Which ones are OK?


• Now try substituting the same words for the verb ‘eat’ in ‘He will eat’.can, play, could, shall, see

• Which ones are OK?• So our substitution test tells us that: ‘can’, ‘could’ ‘shall’ are modals‘play’ and ‘see’ are verbs


• Modals always occur before ‘perfect’ and ‘progressive’ (when they are actually present) and before a ‘verb’.

• Verbs occur after all possible elements in the auxiliary.


• How do we know that perfect ‘have -en’ is not a modal?

• Try the substitution test on:

He will have eaten.• Can you substitute a modal for ‘have’?

*He will may eaten?• Can you reverse the order of ‘will’ and ‘have”?

*He have will eaten?


• How do we know that progressive ‘be -ing’ is not a modal?

• Try the substitution test on:

He will have eaten.

*He be having eaten.


• How do we know that progressive ‘be –ing’ and perfect ‘have –en’ are separate categories?

• Try reversing them in:

He may have been eating.

*He may be having eaten.

Still not convinced about modals?

• Lets apply the meaning test.

• Modals express the speaker’s attitude or intentions with respect to the sentence. Modals can express possibility, probability, necessity, intention, etc., as in:

• I will go.

• I may go.

• I must go.

Still not convinced about modals?

• Lets apply the inflection test.

• Unlike verbs, modals do not take the present tense ‘s’ inflection in the 3rd person singular verbs.

He eats at nine.

*He wills eat at nine.

*He mays eat at nine.

Homework

• We can apply the distribution and meaning tests to identify perfect and progressive as distinct functional categories.

• The meanings of sentences with perfect and progressive are affected in interesting ways.

• Think about the meanings of the sentences with perfect and progressive on the following slide.

• Be prepared to discuss them in your DGD.

Perfect and ProgressiveJohn has studied karate, but he is more interested in kickboxing. John had studied karate for ten years before he got his black belt.

I lived in Florida for ten years. Then I moved to Texas.I have lived in Florida for ten years, but I still miss Canada.I had lived in Florida for ten years before I saw my first alligator.

I can’t talk while I am driving.I didn’t use my cell while I was driving.I am driving to Montreal tomorrow.

Think about the concept of tense in English and what it expresses:

I am exercising right now. (present progressive - ongoing)I exercise every day. (simple present - habitual)I exercised every day last week. (simple past - completed)I was exercising when you called me last week. (past progressive - ongoing in past)

Perfect• Perfect have-en expresses the duration of an event as in ‘I have

lived in Florida for ten years.’ In the past tense it can also express the duration of an event with respect to a certain point in the past, as in ‘I had lived in Florida for ten years when they discovered I was an illegal alien.’ Perfect have-en can also be used to refer to an event that took place over some indefinite period in the past, even when the sentence is actually inflected for the present, as in ‘I have studied karate’.

• Perfect have-en is rarely used to indicate a completed act. Instead English uses the simple past tense as in ‘I lived in Florida for ten years.’ Compare that to the sense of duration in ‘I have lived in Florida for 10 years.’ Note also that the simple present in English cannot express duration as in *I know John for ten years. However, the simple present in English does express habitual actions as in ‘I eat breakfast at seven.’

Progressive

• Progressive be-ing refers to events in progress in either the present or the past. In the present, the event is understood as happening while the sentence is being uttered. In the past, the event is understood as happening while another event in the discourse was happening. Progressive can also communicate anticipation of an event which will happen as in ‘I am going shopping later.’ There is a narrative discourse style in English that uses the present progressive and the simple present to relate events that occurred in the story, as in ‘I’m walking down the street last night and this guy jumps out from behind a parked car and starts yelling at me (etc.)’

A word about auxiliaries

• English has four different functional categories that can be described as auxiliaries:tense, modal, perfect, progressiveIf modal, perfect and progressive are all in a sentence, they must occur in that specific order for the sentence to be grammatical.We will discuss tense placement later.

From Word Categories to Phrases

• Sentences are made up of sub-parts called phrases.

• Every language has a set of rules for forming these phrases.

• They are called Phrase Structure Rules• The Phrase Structure Rules are a set of rules

that allow us to map out the structures of phrases in a language.

• We diagram these structures as inverted trees.

From Word Categories to Phrases

• The inverted trees reflect the hierarchical arrangement of phrases.

• Sentences consist of a series of phrases also joined together in a hierarchical manner.

Merge: X’ (X-bar)

Merge is the part of the syntax in which of words are fitted together into phrases and in which phrases are joined together to form sentences.

Merge combines words into phrases using the X’ schema that we will be discussing shortly.

The Phrase Structure Rules determining these phrases used to be fairly elaborate, but in the current formulation of the theory have been essentially streamlined to the X’ schema.

Merge: Subcategorization

Phrases are also the product of an interaction between the X’ schema and the subcategorization properties of words.

• Subcategorization refers to the type of complement structures that certain words must or can appear with.

‘to hate’ (verb) requires a direct object

*I hate. I hate carrots.

I hate carrots.

Merge: D-structure

Merge results in what used to be called the Deep (D) Structure of a sentence

The D-structure of a sentence very closely resembles the canonical word order in the language.

D structure is not, however, the final form of the sentence.

Move

Not all sentences have the canonical word order in the language.Thus another component of syntax, called Move, moves elements to where they belong in the surface structure or S-structure of the sentence.

• Compare:• John is eating an apple. (canonical)• Is John eating an apple? (non-canonical)

Why D- and Surface Structure?

• We just saw that not all sentences follow canonical word order.

• But why not allow Merge to create these structures in the first place?

• Why do we need Move?

• I will provide some reasons in the next few slides and point out others as we explore the syntax more thoroughly.


• By adhering to strict canonical word order, D-structure gives us important information about the semantic roles of the elements in a sentences, especially the main nouns with respect to the verb.

• Thus, for English, the first Noun Phrase constituent in the tree represents the subject of the sentence.

• The subject of the sentence has a special relationship to the verb, as it is the doer of the action or agent.


• The first Noun Phrase immediately following a transitive verb is its direct object or theme.

• In semantics, these relationships of nouns with respect to verbs and their subjects and objects are called thematic roles.

The students read the book.

agent theme


• The thematic roles of the constituents of the sentence would not be so apparent at D-structure if non-canonically ordered trees were permitted.

• The move component of the syntax can operate on D-structure trees to create these non-canonical orders as required.


• At D-structure it is clear when two sentences have the same thematic relationships between their words.

• Recall the sentences we looked at a few classes ago:


declarative:

Everyone is happy.

(verb)

yes/no question:

Is everyone happy?

(verb)


Wh question:What are they looking at?objecttheme

Declarative:They are looking at what.

object» theme


scrambled order:

The boy gave the toy to the girl. direct indirect object

theme goalThe boy gave the girl the toy.

indirect direct goal theme


• By having the alternative word orders created by Move, there is no need for extra phrase structure rules that would create essentially the same structure in two different places in the tree.

• So we don’t need a rule in Merge permitting a verb to occur at the beginning of a tree as well as after the subject:Is everyone happy? Everyone is happy.

• We also don’t risk confusion about whether the role of the nouns ‘everyone’ and ‘what’ in the question sentences.

A schematic of syntax

Merge

Deep Structure

Move

Syntactic Surface Structure

Is that all there is to the grammar?

• In the previous slide we saw that Merge creates D-structure which is acted upon by Move which in turn creates Syntactic Surface Structure.

• Is that it for the grammar? No.• The syntactic surface structure does not

represent the final spoken form of the utterance.• The rules of phonology and semantic

interpretation (logical form) must apply before the sentence is fully derived.

From theory to practice

• Merge is the product of the X’ schema.

• This basically sets out the structure of a typical, generic phrase as:

» XP

(Specifier) X’

X(complement)

From theory to practice

The abbreviations in the generic X’ phrase structure tree X=part of speech of the head of the phraseP=phrase (e.g. NP = noun phrase)Specifier=phrase boundary marker, makes meaning of head more preciseComplement=phrases which provide information about the meaning of the head. The type of complement a head can take is part of the information stored with it in the mental lexicon.

NB: Parentheses ( ) mean that an element is optional in some phrases and with some heads.

Types of X - Heads

• Heads can be: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Prepositions

• At the sentence level, heads are called:

I = Inflection C= Complementizer

We will discuss sentence heads later.

Specifiers (abbreviations in bold)

• The following can act as Specifiers:

Determiners (for nouns N):

e.g. ‘the, a, this, these, those, no,’

Adverbs (for verbs V):

e.g. ‘never, perhaps, often, always

Degree word (for Adjectives A, Prepositions P)

e.g. ‘very, quite, more, almost’

Complements

• Phrases that add information about entities and locations implied by the head and for which the head is subcategorized.

• In the following example, the NP ‘carrots’ is the complement of the verb ‘hate’.

‘to hate’ requires a direct object complement

*I hate. I hate carrots.

Other Complement Examples

• prepositional phrases as in:1. I often eat [at that restaurant]. 2. I never approved [of that purchase].3. I was certain [of his loyalty].4. The destruction [of the city] angered me.• 1 and 2 show verb complements,• 3 shows an adjective complement.• 4 shows a noun complement.

Practice drawing phrase structures

• Keep in mind that all phrases follow the x’ schema.

XP

(Specifier) X’

X(complement)

He often reads tons [of books]

He [often reads tons of books]

How to recognize a phrase

• Look for typical heads, such as:

noun, verb, adjective, preposition

• Work from right to left, since English branches right and your lowest phrases in the tree will likely be found to the right.

• Consider possible structures of phrase and see how X’ applies

Complements

• N B: See O&A Charts 5.5 (p143), 5.6, 5.7, 5.8 (p144) for types of complements

Verb Complements

Noun, adjective, preposition complements

Phrase Tests

• You can also try the phrase tests of:

substitution

movement

coordination

Substitution Test

• nouns can be replaced by ‘they’ ‘it’

[The boys] bought [a firecracker].

• verbs can be replaced by ‘do so’

The children can [play].

• prepositional phrase can be replaced by ‘there’

He went [to the bank].

Movement Test

• prepositional phrases can often be moved without compromising the grammaticality of the sentence

The children sang [in the chapel].

[In the chapel] the children sang.

Coordination Test

• a phrase can be conjoined with another phrase of the same type using ‘and’

They [mowed the lawn].

They [mowed the lawn] and [raked the leaves].

Sally saw the car on the hill.

- ‘hill’ is a noun, so it must be part of an NP

- ‘the’ is determiner, so it must be the specifier of the NP ‘the hill’

Sally saw the car on [the hill].


- ‘on’ is a preposition, which is the head of a PP

- PPs have NPs as their complement, so ‘the hill’ is the complement of the PP with ‘of’.

Sally saw the car [on the hill].


- ‘car’ is a noun, so it must be the head of an NP

- ‘the’ is a determiner, so it must be the specifier of the NP with ‘car’

- ‘on the hill’ is a PP which acts as a complement to ‘car’

Sally saw [the car on the hill].


-’saw’ is a verb, which acts as the head of a VP

-’saw’ is subcategorized for an NP complement

-the NP complement of ‘saw’ is ‘the car…’

Sally [saw the car on the hill].


’Sally’ is a noun, which is the head of an NP

[Sally] saw the car on the hill.

But how does it all fit together?

Using X’, the theory treats the subject NP as the specifier of a new phrase called IP

The theory treats VP of the sentence as the complement of this phrase.

The head of the phrase is the tense inflection of the sentence I.

Remember that English has only two tenses:

past (+pst) present (-pst)

Try: The dog bit the cat.

The dog bit the cat.

IP

IP allows us to deal with the tense and modal parts of the auxiliary of the sentence.

The remaining parts of the auxiliary (perfect ‘have’ and progressive ‘be’)

are handled a little differently, as we will see.

Modals in IP

• The theory treats models has the lexical part of I of the IP.

• This is because models have inherent tense.

• We never add a tense inflection to make them past or present.

He will eat. (-pst, NB: no ‘s’ in 3rd pers. sg.)

He would eat if he had money (-pst)

He would eat whenever anyone fed him. (+pst)

Modals in IP

• You judge the tense of the modal based on the rest of the sentence or discourse.

• If there is a modal, the verb is not marked for tense.

The dog will bite the cat.

The dog bites the cat.

Modals in IP

• Note that if there is no Modal, the tense in the PS tree matches the inflection on the verb.

• This may seem bizarre, but syntactic theory has had a long-standing conflict of over whether and how to handle inflectional morphology.

• Compare:

Modals in IP• Any modal could take the place of ‘will’ in ‘The

dog will bite the cat’.• The dog will bite the cat.• The dog would bite the cat.• The dog may bite the cat.• The dog can bite the cat.• The dog could bite the cat.• The dog should bite the cat.• The dog must bite the cat.• The dog might bite the cat.• The dog shall bite the cat.

Perfect and Progressive

• If the sentence contains the auxiliaries perfect or progressive or both, these are treated as verbs.

• This will give us successive VPs as follows:

Modal, Perfect and Progressive

• In ‘The dog has bitten the cat’, note that tense is on perfect ‘have’, not on the verb.

• Tense with perfect ‘have’ is relative to the other events in the discourse.

• Compare a sentence with modal and perfect.

• The dog will have bitten the cat.• Here tense is expressed through modal

‘will’, rather than on ‘have’.

Modal-Perfect-Progressive

• In older versions of the theory, the affixes associated with perfect ‘have’ (-en) and progressive ‘be (-ing) were shown together with them as unattached inflections in the PS.

• Movement took place to attach them where they belonged.

• Nowadays, syntacticians do not want morphological operations within syntax.

• Thus they are glossed over in the PS trees.

Whole Sentences as Complements

• What if our complement is a whole sentence embedded in the bigger sentence.

• We use the term clause for sentence.

• Hence – embedded clause.

• A clause must have a verb.

Embedded Clauses

• I know [that Mary has left].

• Compare it to:• I know [the answer].• The [ ] structures are both complements

of the verb, but one is a clause (aka: sentence).

• The embedded clause acts like an NP.

Embedded Clauses

• Embedded clauses that replace NPs are marked by the words ‘that’ or ‘whether’ or ‘if’.

• These are called complementizers.

• They form the head of a CP (complementizer phrase) that goes into the complement position of the VP.

SYNTAX LIN 1310. Syntax is the component of grammar that deals with sentence structure. Before we...

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